Tuesday, February 13, 2007TV Round-Up: 24Day Six: 1 - 3 p.m.That Bauer family sure is a dysfunctional one. Papa Bauer blames Jack for the death of Graem (which Papa Bauer caused, by the way) then kidnaps his grandson to keep Graem's wife from leading Jack to the Russian general who could implicate Papa Bauer in the conspiracy here on day six. Meanwhile, Graem's wife reveals she's been trying to leave him for years and asks Jack, "So did you join the army because you were distraut over me?" and is shot down hard by Jack. I had to wonder if she hadn't been holding out some secret hope that Jack still loved her all these years and here Jack just takes the golf cleats to her heart on that one. That was pretty brutal, you have to admit (but it's close to Valentine's Day so I guess that's as close as we'll get to a sweet, romantic moment for the show...well, unless Audrey shows up at some point).

Man, Jack sure knows how to pile on himself. Bill Buchanan gives him an a way out of blame for the death of his brother and Jack chooses to not take it. Instead, he'll take a heaping plate of guilt with a side of self-doubt and blame, thank you.

All this and he almost gets blown up (by a bomb his dad planted, no less!) and he has to disarm a suitcase nuke.

Which the use of said nuke brings up some questions. Fayed apparently worked pretty hard to get these nukes and they're part of some greater overall plan. So if that's true, he seems pretty careless about them. I can see that he needs to escape with the device Morris created in order to arm the others, but does it make a lot of sense to leave the nuke around for Jack to disarm it? Because we all knew Jack would disarm it--he is, after all, Jack Bauer.

Speaking of that, why did they make such pains to get Morris and declare him to be one of the only people who could program the device to arm the nukes only for Fayed to say, "I'll just find another programmer if you die"? Did Fayed somehow think if he kills Morris and Chloe finds out that she will hunt him down like an animal? Because I think that would have happened. We did see Chloe with a machine gun a few years ago.

The torture of Morris was pretty brutal. I won't look at a cordless drill in quite the same way again for a while. The part of the first hour of the two-hour event had me on the edge of my seat. And I wondered why Morris didn't somehow write some code in to make it appear like he'd succeeded instead of giving Fayed the device he needs to arm the nukes. Seems to me this was just a way to get Fayed out on the loose with a necessary component to arming the other three devices and possibly setting them off at "high profile" targets. What those high profile targets are, I'm not quite sure.

And is all of this some plot to push an agenda by this conspiracy of people that we've seen lurking in the shadows? And is Tom now part of it or will his loyalty to Palmer help expose what's going on? One of the interesting scenes is how we found out that Wayne was approached by Tom to run for president and that Tom ran the whole campaign. Does this mean Tom felt he couldn't win but Wayne could and wanted to install Wayne as a puppet, to follow his agenda? And what exactly is the agenda? I get the feeling that Tom is misguided a bit, but deep down he's not necessarily evil. But that may or may not be changing, depending of if he jumps in with the plot to remove Wayne by whatever means necessary.

And did Wayne learn nothing from his brother about these things?

So, we've got a far-reaching conspiracy, a terrorist who can set off some nukes and the a rogue Russian general who wants to attack America but set up the Arabs for it. And yet, as I watch I feel as though we're not going anywhere fast this year. We're spinning the wheels and the storylines seem to be treading the same ground we've seen in previous years. There were isolated parts of this story that had me interested--Morris's capture and the scenes of his torture, the double cross of McCarthy--but overall, I can't say there was a lot here that was really that thrilling or worthy of a two-hour event. Honestly, the second hour was a bit too slow moving and I wonder if the producers knew this and paired it with the more intense first hour to keep us from feeling like a week had been wasted in the unfolding drama of day six.

And I've got to say it--the logic of driving around on the off-chance we happen to find the place that the Russian general might be....that just really strained credibility.

I keep saying that something needs to happen to jump start this day. We've been in a holding pattern since the nuke went off. I'm not sure how you top that, but there has to be something to get this story rolling. There are some good elements in play here, but they need to start coming together soon or we risk a long, extended journey to Mexico like we got in season three...